Sunday, January 1, 2017

Future Hunters (Philippines post-apocalypse-adventure, 1986)

1986 - Future
Hunters (Lightning Pictures)

[US/Filipino/Trinidad
co-production filmed in 1985 as "The Spear Of Destiny";
released as "Deadly Quest", in France as “Les Nouveaux
Conquérants”, in Italy as "Eroi Del Futuro", and in
Poland as "Mysliwi Z Przyszlosci"]

Cirio told me in our
interview that his post-apocalypse feature Stryker (1983) held the
fondest memories for him, and I can understand why. It's not just the
first in a string of Road Warrior clones which, due to its phenomenal
success overseas, brought Cirio back into the Corman fold. Moreso,
it's the film which neatly divides his export career in two distinct
phases, the Drive-In Years (from 1973's Savage to 1981's Firecracker)
and the Direct-To-Video Years - a slight misnomer, since Corman was
releasing some features to theatres as late as The Sisterhood (1988),
but apt, since it was in the burgeoning Home Video market that Cirio
would be at his most industrious.

Cirio originally
approached Corman to distribute Stryker, and for reasons only known
to Roger, he turned it down. Instead, Cirio found an international
sales agent, Trinidad-born distributor Anthony Maharaj, who managed
to sell the film worldwide as a cost-effective alternative to the
rampaging hordes of post-apocalypse films pouring out of Europe in
the wake of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Escape From New York
(Cirio was delighted, if completely mystified, why Stryker would have
a dream run in French cinemas for an entire year!). With the aspiring
filmmaker Maharaj, a three-film partnership was born while Cirio was
still reviving his association with Corman, all with Maharaj on
producer and story duties: the urban actioner First Mission (1984),
the I Spit On Your Grave-inspired Naked Vengeance (1985), and a film
defies any single tag: a post-apocalypse, jungle action-adventure –
with kung fu! - called Spear Of Destiny, later renamed Future Hunters
(1986).

The film opens,
appropriately enough, in a desert wasteland in 2025 AD, almost forty
years after a global calamity has turned the Earth into wasteland. A
lone warrior named Matthew (Richard Norton, complete with broad
Australian accent) is pursued by an evil warlord named Zaar (David
Light); both are after the prize, the Spear of Longinus, said to be
the point that pierced the side of Christ while on the Cross, and
once the spear head and shaft are reunited, so legend has it, gives
the beholder its power to change the world's destiny. Thus, in the
hands of those insane enough to wield it for personal gain (Hitler
for one, or so the story goes), it can cause empires to fall. In
Matthew's hands – and he is mankind's only hope, the narrator
reminds us – it can turn back time. And it does – to 1986,
moments before the global catastrophe is set to occur, and he
stumbles from the temple into modern-day California carrying the
Spear's point, just in time to save Michelle (Linda Carol), a young
kewpie-doll anthropologist and her boyfriend Slade (Robert Patrick)
from a gang of biker rapists. Slam! Matthew kicks into high gear,
Whack! Down the bikers drop. Then Slunk! Matthew plunges the Spear
head into one of the bikers and watches the guy melt into molasses.

Sadly Norton's
character checks out of the film early, expiring on Slade's back seat
after warning them of the calamity to come, and begging them to find
a scientist named Hightower. He's the expert at the local university
on Spear of Longinus, but is currently MIA looking for a fabled Venus
Valley somewhere in Southeast Asia. His assistant Fielding (Ed Crick)
is more than interested in Michelle's artefact, and on the trail of
Professor Hightower from California to Hong Kong they find themselves
pursued by Fielding's henchmen, a jackbooted Aryan thug named Bauer
(Bob Schott), random gunmen, lone assassins, and even the Triads.
Even a low-key visit to a Hong Kong shrine ends in a kung fu showdown
between the white-haired temple priest Silverfox (the ubiquitous
martial arts actor Jang Lee Hwang) and their taxi driver, played by
one of the Bruceploitation industry's busiest clones, Bruce Le!
Everyone wants the spear, it seems, and none more than Fielding's
neo-Nazi organization, who clench their fists and gibber ceaselessly
about bringing on the “cleansing” fires of Armageddon.

At this point the
trail takes Michelle and Slade to the Philippines, where on one of
its many islands it's rumoured the lost Venus Valley is located.
Their tour guides? Cirio's old Stryker stand-by, an army of dwarf
monks: the essential binding, it seems, with most Pinoy B films, but
without the freakshow element we would expect; unlike Western
culture, Filipino dwarves have less sinister or nightmarish
connotations, and are regarded instead as innocent, pure, childlike
or somehow magical. In Cirio's world, however, it's more like a nod
to George Lucas' Sand People or Ewoks, and deliberately cued for yet
another “what the...?” moment. From then on the film's like a
Cirio pinball machine: from dwarves to Mongols, to Nazis, to Amazon
Women, BACK to Nazis, and a finale where the Spear and Shaft are
finally united in Jo Mari Avellana's elaborately threadbare Amazon
village, but not before a fight with an awkward Michelle and an
Amazon Huntress (Seventies starlet and “wet look” pioneer
Eliabeth Oropesa) over a fire-lined crocodile pit. More explosions,
an avalanche of plaster boulders, and we've just witnessed one nutty,
NUTTY movie.

As Kathleen Turner
and Michael Douglas stand-ins, Slade and Michelle are more a case of
Romancing The Stoned; for one thing, they're already a couple long
past the honeymoon stage who don't really seem to like each other,
and while we never actually see them getting down to the dirty deed,
there's certainly lots of pouting, nagging, and unnecessary
post-coital (or NON-coital) lounging around in underwear. To be
honest, if the Spear of Destiny is the glue keeping their
relationship together, the planet's not the only thing that's
doomed... Linda Carol is a cute lead, whether she's underplaying or
overplaying her lines (she later faced off against Wendy O. Williams
in the cheerful send-up of prison movies, Reform School Girls)
whereas Robert Patrick, in only his second lead role (after Clark
Henderson's Mexican drug wars film Warlords From Hell) looks
completely bewildered at the events that brought him – and would
return him three more times - to a Cirio set in the Philippines.
Other noted Cirio alumni include Henry Strzalkowski as Bauer's right
hand man – he gets a close-up fondling Linda Carol's trussed-up
torso before delivering his single line “Shuddup” - dressed like
a WW2 Japanese soldier alongside Eric Hahn and IFD regular Mike
Abbott. An uncredited Nick Nicholson also appears briefly as a thug
shooting at Slade and Michelle before his car bursts into flames,
though I swear I saw him materialize later in a Japanese uniform.

There are several
ways of looking at this magnificent mutant of a feature, a six-legged
Frankenstein horse lumbering out of the Philippines' sand dunes with
limbs of different colours and lengths. At first glance it's part
Terminator, Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Romancing The Stone, with the
Road Warrior scenario Cirio had already plundered for Stryker at the
beginning and a little Bruceploitation thrown in for extra seasoning
at the end of Act One. It's a grab-bag, and a desperate one,
attempting to cover as many bases as its 100 minutes will allow AND
YET amidst the madness it somehow holds itself together and is
propelled forward by its own inane internal logic. If Cirio's later
Road Warrior and Platoon clones are interchangeable, Future Hunters
stands entirely on its own: ambitious, unapologetic and utterly
preposterous, it represents Cirio at a playful, experimental,
genre-splicing peak.

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HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.